As the megatrends of Big Data, mobility and cloud continue to reshape the IT landscape many companies are responding by refocusing their solutions to provide better visibility and support for these technologies. Case in point is AppDynamics new Spring 2014 release announced yesterday (full disclosure, AppDynamics is a sponsor on DevOps.com but that sponsorship has nothing to do with editorial content, just banners).
I had a chance to catch up with Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics yesterday. Jyoti made it very plain that mobile applications are quickly tipping the bar in terms of what types of applications his customers are asking for support on. That along with enhanced NoSQL support and support of some for some of the hottest languages being used in development today (Node.js and Scala) lead the way in his company’s latest release.
Gartner has weighed in on the increasing importance of monitoring mobile app performance. Jonah Kowall, research vice president at Gartner, in a recent report states, “driven by the increasing significance of mobile application endpoints and increasingly dynamic Web technologies, end-user-experience monitoring will become even more important to enterprises. In fact, it is likely to shift its center of gravity from monitoring the end-user experience of individual applications to monitoring and analyzing end-user behaviors across the entire portfolio of applications available to an end-user at any given endpoint.”
Personally I don’t think any of us need Gartner to tell us that there is an app for just about anything and many of them are mobile. Mobility is changing the way so many of us work. Mobile apps are poised to overtake web browsing sometime this year says Jyoti.
If anything is bigger than mobile though it may be Big Data. It seems that Big Data is everywhere. I saw an interesting stat the other day, something along the lines of 90% of all the data stored in the world is less than two years old. I guess that explains why we didn’t hear as much about Big Data before that. In any event there is big money being poured into Big Data solutions. Evidence of this is Intel’s Cloudera investment, $740m for 18% of the company. Cloudera is a Hadoop distributor of course and part of the AppDynamics new Big Data support is for enhanced Hadoop features.
NoSQL companies have also been a big beneficiary of the Big Data megatrend and VC investment of course. One of the biggest beneficiaries is MongoDB (again in full disclosure, DevOps.com is a media sponsor of MongoDB World). Matt Asay who has written here on DevOps.com and is also the VP of Marketing and Business Development had this to say about AppDynamics new NoSQL support. “Together with AppDynamics and MongoDB, organizations can now leverage application performance management solutions to gain further insight into their MongoDB-based applications. This partnership allows users end-to-end visibility for optimal performance in production, an important feature for companies as they scale their MongoDB deployments.”
To be accurate all of these new features in the Spring 2014 release of AppDynamics have actually been available already for at least a few weeks or months. In my conversation with Bansal I asked him that if he didn’t see a little irony in the fact that a DevOps enabler like AppDynamics still did somewhat traditional software releases instead of some sort of continuous delivery. Bansal said that these once a quarter releases are really just packaging up features that are released in a continuous fashion over the preceding quarter. These quarterly releases serve as a checkpoint, version control if you will. In actuality though AppDynamic customers have been getting this functionality as it comes out.
Application Performance Management seems to be a very hot area. In large part because of the mega trends of Big Data, mobility and cloud. It remains to be seen if these solutions will become part of (by acquisition or partnership) the bigger Application Development Lifecycle Management (ALM) market.